Don Page discusses his parental background and missionary work of parents; childhood in Alaska; early interest in mathematics; early reading; influence of an article by William Fowler on the origin of the elements; early thoughts about cosmology; college experience at William Jewell College in Missouri; National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) summer institute in space physics; early interest in black holes; influence of Kip Thorne at California Institute of Technology (Caltech); interaction with Bill Press, Saul Teukolsky, and Richard Feynman at Caltech; superradiant scattering from black holes; meeting and working with Stephen Hawking; work on instantons; postdoc with Hawking; work on black hole thermodynamics; work on the second law of thermodynamics and the arrow of time; Hawking and Hartle's no boundary proposal for quantum cosmology; freedom of God in setting up the universe; reconciliation of religion and physics; possible universes; interpretation of quantum mechanics; interest of God in universes with life; meaning of the Bible and man's relationship to God; question of whether the universe has a purpose; initial attitude toward the horizon problem; importance of Penrose's "entropy problem"; inflation and the entropy problem; initial attitude toward the inflationary universe model; current attitude toward inflation; probability of inflation; reasons why inflationary universe model has been so influential; attitude toward the flatness problem; the anthropic principle; relative concern over the horizon problem and the flatness problem; visual images in cosmology; ideal design for the universe.

(1948- ): Ph.D. in physics and astronomy, California Institute of Technology (1976); worked with Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge (1976-1979); professor of physics at Pennsylvania State University. Research interests include the thermodynamics of black holes, quantum gravity, and studies of the quantum state of the universe.